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Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Poverty and plenty in the Frontier Army

As Americans expanded into the trans-Mississippi West, much
more than just people moved; food, drink, clothing, and furniture—a whole
caravan of consumer goods—also moved west. These consumer goods reconfigured
the economy and society of the entire region. And this was especially true in
the U.S. Army.

The U.S. Government proved unable to restrain the worst
excesses of Euro-American settlement in the West, it also proved to be an
inefficient manager of army consumption. Federal incompetence, malfeasance, and
inertia created a situation in which soldiers of all ranks hat to make up
shortfalls in the army supply system with their own money. According to Edward
Coffman, the army “shifted the burden to the men, with the result that soldiers
wound up paying out of their own pockets not only for food but also for
clothing. Officers confronted shortages, too.

The army’s institutional context encouraged the development
of worlds of consumption, but it did not produce those worlds. In the frontier
army, social class remained a constant. Still, by working together, soldiers
were able to create a lower-class world of consumers.

Officers at Fort Laramie

Officers used consumption to define themselves as elites.
Lobsters for dinner, furniture from New York, fine cigars, oysters . . . all
symbolized the prosperous upper class to which officers felt they belonged. In
his book, Class and Race in the Frontier Army, Kevin Adams points out that one army surgeon wrote: “army officers at
that time as a rule literally lived up to their salaries . . . an officer was
considered by many other officers as a little off-color if he was close-fisted
and tried to save money out of his pay.”

We should note at this point that even the lowest-ranking
officer of the frontier army was in the top 10% of household income of that
period. Officers had lots of money to spend.

Officers sought to carry with them—be it on a scouting
mission or a surveying expedition—the gentility they enjoyed in garrison life.
On the other hand, a thread of subterranean vice and illegal activity among
enlisted men can be found in every form of army consumption. As Adams writes:
“if consumption served as a microcosm of American expansion, then the
communalism of enlisted men imparts an alternative vision of expansion. The West
was more than just a battleground for fierce individualists; it also engendered
egalitarian cooperation among the largely working-class soldiers of the
frontier army.” And this represents a minor, yet real, historical alternative
to the better-known excesses of western settlement.

Chow time

It was as if officers and soldiers did not even live on the
same planet. While officers spend extravagant amounts on food, their men
existed on basic army rations—hardtack, bacon or salt pork, and coffee. Well,
garrison supplies also included beef, usually procured locally, salt pork,
flour (to be baked into bread, and any surplus was sold to augment company
funds), coffee, and beans. The result, as you might expect, was scurvy.

Soldier pay was less than low, and paydays did not come
regulary. So sutlers lent them money at usurious interest rates. Still, for
enlisted men, the biggest problem was lack of proper nourishment. A veteran of
the Chief Joseph pursuit said, “If this is a war of attrition, the Nez Perce the
food and we were getting the appetites.”

Typical frontier sutler's store

The quality of army rations often left a great deal to be
desired. A surgeon condemned the miserable rations of pork and hardtack, “often
containing green worms.” Adams says an Army
and Navy Journal article from November 1886 described pickled pork so bad
it made man “sick to vomiting if they succeed in swallowing it.” Further,
cooking left much to be desired, as the army did not expressly train men to be
cooks until 1898. A lesson in how to make bad rations worse.

Remember the basics: hardtack, bacon or salt pork, coffee.
In the 19th century, diversification to the soldier’s diet had to
come from the men themselves. And they often turned to outside sources. They
would buy from Indians, Mexicans, and Chinese. And they got eggs, butter, meat,
and vegetables from local whites—ranchers, farmers, townspeople, and the like.

Enlisted men ran company gardens, raised domesticated
animals on post, traded their rations, and came up with an army-wide
institution that they could employ to overcome a commissary system that
marginalized them. To quote Adams: “That outdated system may have been almost
criminally ignorant of the soldiers’ needs, but its shortcomings encouraged
unity and cooperation among them. They systematically traded in their ration
savings for fruits, vegetables, and dairy products for the benefit of all,
using a mechanism that they often controlled directly. This cohesiveness was
the incubator for the class-centered critique of army life that emerged among
enlisted men.”

Officers, however, had lots of food.

A typical upper-class dinner party, which officers emulated

Formal meals among the officer corps were composed of
unusual foods and fine ingredients, cooked and served by domestic help, and
they reflected the impressive reach of upper-class culture in Gilded Age America.

Officers in the west bought oysters, oysters, and more
oysters. Thanksgiving of 1871 in Fort D. A. Russell, saw a ball for the
officers, who paid $200 each for the wine, oysters, and cigars. Other foods
held in high esteem included ice cream, pies, cakes, puddings, and Welsh
rarebit with ale and lemonade. An officer and his family, marching through
Texas, dined on quail on toast and venison steaks.

Merely eating well was not enough for the officer corps.
They had to stretch themselves to create a world of dining extravagance. Meals
were performative events where rituals of class presentation and standing took
place daily. For example, in 1869, the ten officers stationed at Fort Laramie
spent more than 120 times more per capita on food than the 158 enlisted men
serving at the fort.

Officers saw prosperity as much as a matter of style as of
salary. Shopping for exotic and expensive foods, purchasing great amounts of
food, entertaining lavishly, all broadcast their social worthiness.

Again, quoting from Adams: “Officers’ use of food bespoke
gentility, while soldiers’ consumption patterns reflected makeshift and
struggling working-class world in which people lived on society’s margins,
barely squeaking by from paycheck to paycheck. Uncle Sam’s Army could not
escape the same lines of class that were dividing the larger society.”

Whiskey? Or champagne?

Consumption of alcohol was a problem in the frontier army.
Enlisted men drank every chance they got. They got unruly. And while some
officers forgave their “sprees,” others considered drunkenness a moral evil
(although they drank a lot themselves).

Fort Laramie's sutler store in 1877

This may be one reason why. Fort Laramie’s post trader
ordered fourty-four kegs and twenty-six cases of beer in 1883. Someone had to
drink it. In the 1880s, some 4 percent of enlisted men were treated for
alcoholism. And back then, only those with severe symptoms were given medical
treatment. Further, misbehaving and besotted enlisted men accounted for 80
percent of courts-martial back then.

Soldiers drank. Workers in those days drank. Love of alcohol
antagonized supervisors in the civilian world just as it did the army. Now,
frontier officers did not abstain, of course, but they never consumed alcohol
with the ranks. Still, the use of alcohol took a toll on the army’s fitness.
Note that drunkenness among enlisted men affected their performance, and was
thus proscribed, but drunkenness among officers hardly ever got censured.

Officers drank. But to them, it was beneath the dignity of
the U.S. Army to buy liquor where the common rabble drank. Officers drank. But
they did it out of sight. One last case in point.

An officer bought eight gallons of beer and retired out of sight
in his tent for a “jamboree.” This ended when the beer ran out, and just as reports
came in that Indians were crossing the river above camp. Even where consumer culture
among officers and enlisted men seemed most similar, the lines that separated the
two groups remained obvious and unassailable.

My contribution to Western Fictioneers' West of the Big River series. The Sheriff, a novel about the life of Commodore Perry Owens, Sheriff of Apache County AZ, Sheriff of Navajo County AZ, Deputy U.S. Marshal, saloon owner, husband, and father. Oh, and a mighty good horse rancher, too.

6 comments:

I remember noticing period furnishings in Ft. Laramie's officers' quarters that included Persian rugs, ornate desks and lamps. There was obvious division of social class within the Army. I didn't realize it was this far-reaching. Thanks, Chuck!

The Custer home at Fort Abraham Lincoln not far from Bismarck shows the opulence of his lifestyle, too. I didn't think much of it at the time, but this chapter in Adams's book reminded me of what I had seen.

An interesting anecdote I ran across while researching a talk on Civil War medicine... in the 1850's there was an outbreak of scurvy at a Western outpost. The medical department reported that it was caused by the troops only getting dried vegetables. Nonsense, was the response from the quartermaster corps. Couldn't possibly be scurvy, after all the men were getting plenty of dried vegetables.